Carry On

Today was a busy day for me - despite it being the first day of the weekend and the first day without class. Bright and early, we all met outside my and Simon's dorm building to get breakfast together. We were tasked with maneuvering the subway without our chaperone for the first time today - as we were to meet Ms. L. at Washington Square Park at 10:30. Luckily for us Bay Area natives, our combination of BART knowledge and recent acquisition of NYC subway experience allowed us to figure our way across Manhattan rather smoothly. Being used to fuzzy conductor announcements, we didn't even miss the important yet vague week-end train transfer instructions. Mental note: the trains run on a different schedule on the week-ends. 

Our last college tour was today - NYU. In my opinion it was the most well-run info session/tour combination of all of the schools. They got across the main idea, with a touch of personal account from actual students. Although NYU seems like a fantastic school (to me that is; objectively NYU is a fantastic school), it didn't really stand out to me in a personally appealing way. An interesting thing about NYU is their incredible level of internationality - the school has programs abroad on 6 continents and institutions where you can earn an NYU degree centered in New York City, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai. A complaint that I have about the school (and call me picky, but it might be a deal breaker) is that there is no physical campus (at least in New York). I really want to go to a school with a real traditional college feel to it - and for me that includes a fence, grounds and a gate. 

After NYU, we went to see the newly erected 9/11 memorial. I had never been to ground zero before, and even though I was too young to remember the events of 9/11, I was still shocked at some of the aftermath that still remains. The faces of skyscrapers are still blackened - more than a decade later - from ash; and entire buildings are no longer in use. I expected the atmosphere to be more somber, however. The memorial was crowded and I was uncomfortable with the tourist-y vibe that I was sensing - people were taking vacation-esque family photos and selfies in front of the pool-turned-footprints of the World Trade Centers, and there were street venders shamelessly heckling visitors. The pools were beautiful nonetheless; the names of those who were lost that day adorned the entire perimeters of the fountains. I'm very happy to have been able to visit the memorial - though I will never truly feel how those who lost family and friends that day feel, I do feel that I at least understand better what sort of ordeal people had to and continue to deal with because of what transpired on 9/11.